Hello historyphiles, as it’s almost Halloween I’ve been able to put together a particularly unsettling story from the past that I’ve wanted to do for quite some fucking time! This is a big ‘ol warning to start with that the story of Sergei Brukhonenko is seriously disturbing and involves some unpleasantness that are not for the faint of heart. If you’ve never heard of him before this will most likely sound like complete science fiction, but fortunately there are videos of his experiments which I will link at the bottom of the article. HUGE fucking warning, if you think the story is bad to read, for the love of Hedes the god of the underworld there’s no way you should watch the video. It is unsettling. All that out of the way, let’s get up to our bollocks in the story of Sergei Brukhonenko – the real life Dr.Frankenstein!
Born 30th April 1890 Sergei was a soviet biomedical scientist with some pretty big ideas, unfortunately I can find fuck all about his early life but I think it’s safe to assume he was the kind of kid that spoke to road kill and sported a dead unblinking stare. Truth be told the poor bastard barely got a look in to the field of cardiological surgery in the western world with multiple credits of advancements in bypass and open heart surgery going to his western counter-parts. The first recognition of his work I could find in the scholar community not written in Russian was a paper from 1960 entitled “An early Russian heart-lung machine” by Probert and Melrose, where they were all “Yeah, the poor cunt probably deserves some credit here”. He was very gifted intellectually shown by him being a distinguished scientist and professor in Russia.
He was on a bit of a mission to produce a method of bypassing the organs to keep a patient alive while they were being operated on. Which in his defence, before I tell you all the fucked up shit he did, he did essentially make it possible for open heart surgery to be performed with the assistance of the heart-lung blood oxygenation machine he created. So just remember that while you read on. The thing is, the experiments he had to do to prove this concept were unfortunately on man’s best friend. This was of course not the nicest way of doing things but it was a fairly common practice back in the day. However, it seems that Sergei was a bit of an animal lover in his own twisted way. Although he did find it necessary to perform these experiments on dogs, he didn’t like that they would die. Soooo… he managed to find a method of keeping the dogs alive… even in the most unlikely circumstances.
One friendly Fido was kept alive for quite a surprising amount of time after a surgery even though all that remained of the dog was it’s head. It’s shown in the video I’ve link below because it really is completely unbe-fucking-lievable. The dog is there responding to touch, sound, licking it’s nose… but it’s just it’s head. Al hooked up to a Victorian looking piece of machinery just pumping and bubbling away like a steampunk toilet. I thought this was pretty remarkable, particularly for the time but then he goes on to completely drain all of the blood from a dogs body till it’s as dry as the fucking Sahara and dead for a minute or so. Then hooks up his Frankenstein machine minus the lightning bolts and maddening laugh and tells Igor to flick the switch. Just like magic the dog starts to come back to life breathing and reacting as usual. The dog is seen a couple days after completely normal, running around and doing it’s thing.
Honestly I read about this a few years back and thought, “this is a bunch of fucking shite mate”, it was only more recently I discovered that their was footage of the experiments and really was a mix amazed and disgusted. As I mention before this guy did some serious good in the long run but fuck me his Franken-dogs definitely belong in the past.
Sergei Burkhonenko, you crazy fucking bastard.
Link to the videos below for the more morbidly curious, as I said earlier they are very unsettling and as an animal lover myself quit hard to watch. Watch at your own peril.
Leonardo Gavinci 